Hi Quan,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 2: I have 2 or 3 emerging interests but am unsure how to figure out which one to pursue .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were achievement, self-direction, and power.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was openness.
You said your top three talents were analytic, kinesthetic, and spiritual.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to get an internship .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Do well on midterms .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Feel accomplished .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Procrastination .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I reach out for my phone, then I’ll slap my hand .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Rubik’s Cube .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Intrigued when receiving critical feedback, and Intrigued when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling none of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being job recruiting .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .
In one word, you said it made you feel Happy .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
| |
| I found the insight that happiness is a pursuit of things that is going right most interesting |
| Interest is an emotion and being in a flow state in extreme interest |
| It would be how happiness is everything aligned together |
| Goal fusion is very effective |
| WOOP optimizes the process of goal setting and planning |
| Innate talent doesn't matter as much as deliberate practice in the long run |
| A lot is relate to ego or self esteem |
| Stress can be enhancing and helpful |
| Just do it is not smart and I need a good strategy to approach it |
| Relationships are most important |
| Empathy is needed to be a good team player |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
| |
| Coby Melkin |
| I really appreciate Quan‘s thoughtfulness in discussions and during pair and shares. He is a great listener and often has an insightful response to a comment just made. He always asks how everyone’s week was, and effectively facilitates our group’s conversations. I believe that his calm demeanor and kind personality will serve him well in his pursuit of business and in life. Thank you for teaching me so much!
I found Quan‘s discovery project to be both ambitious and impressive. It is one thing to solve a Rubiks cube at all, another to solve it in less than 20 seconds, but to solve a Rubiks cube blindfolded is quite the feat. I was impressed by how Quan broke down the larger level goal Into sub goals and address each one. Specifically, he used a form of Chungking in order to remember the 316 algorithmic steps needed to ensure the Rubiks cube is solved. I also admired his use of a discovery project BFF. |
| Ilana Jacobs |
| Quan is a really smart guy, but he is also really humble about it. I definitely think that he is destined for success because he is enrolled in Grit Lab already as a sophomore, while the rest of the group decided to become grittier our senior year. He’s already really ambitious at such a young age. And not only is he smart, but he’s really funny and nice. It’s really pleasant to have a conversation with him, and I have found it really interesting to hear about his unique perspectives as an international student at Penn. This kid is going places for sure.
Quan’s discovery project definitely reflected his ambition and intelligence. Not only did he want to learn how to solve a rubix cube, but he wanted to do it blindfolded. That sounds absolutely crazy and unachievable to me, but to Quan it was the perfect challenge. It was also super interesting to hear about the process of solving a rubix cube, and how each square is identified with a letter and a number, and how there is a specific sequence that you must memorize if you are to solve the rubix cube. I was extremely impressed with his final project and am really proud of all the hard work he put into it.
|
| Abigail So |
| Dear Quan,
It was a pleasure having you on my team this semester! You were so kind, nice, and funny. Thank you so much for giving me your candy during class! I really appreciate that you always asked about our days—even when you were not having the best day. You always made sure that we were doing well and that our schoolwork wasn't too much. I also appreciated how you were so open about anything that we asked. I remember one time when you were explaining that you missed your hometown back in Vietnam. You talked about the food back home and how the Vietnamese food here is not as good. I enjoyed your sense of humor and optimistic attitude every day!
I very much appreciated that your discovery project was about a tricky activity: solving a Rubik's cube. I did not expect you to embark on this type of journey due to its high level of difficulty. I really liked how you mapped out each portion of the cube to solve the puzzle. Your presentation was seamlessly organized, and it was so easy to follow. Even though I did not learn how to solve a Rubik's cube, I learned where to start. I now know that I have to memorize approximately 700 moves to get to a point where the cube becomes solvable. You made the presentation so fun and riveting to listen to!
I wish you the best in your future. I have no doubts that you will land an amazing internship! |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.